Ian Bicking: a blog

Background

I’m taking these lessons primarily from the experiences of my sister, who along with 7 others is currently facing felony conspiracy charges in Minnesota (felony conspiracy to riot with a dangerous weapon and to commit property damage). These charges are specifically for organizing protests in the lead up to the 2008 RNC convention in St. Paul. It’s only one data point, but in these matters there’s only a handful of cases that inform the discussion.

The city of St. Paul and other local governments received over $50 million for security for the RNC, and some of that money was quickly put into hiring informants to infiltrate organizations, anarchist organizations in particular. My sister among others were part of an organization known as the RNC Welcoming Committee. In total three informants were highly involved in the organization, each of them attending literally hundreds of hours of meetings. The Committee primarily worked on things like promoting the protests against the RNC, acquiring meeting space and internet access for people, finding housing and food for people visiting for the protests, and distributing logistical information like where protests would occur.

"Anarchism" means "without rulers": in line with their anarchist principles they didn’t try to prescribe how people would protest, they felt people should make their own choices about how to protest. The choices people made were widespread, ranging from staying in a "free speech zone" to a few permitted marches, some unpermitted marches, some civil disobedience, some blockading, and in a very small number of cases some people committed property damage. The Welcoming Committee did not advocate any particular kind of protest, they would not be their brother’s keeper, nor did they want to disparage any kind of protest as too timid. Each person should act on their own conscience.

Immediately before the RNC started the 8 were arrested and held for the duration of the convention before being charged and released on bail. Their houses and cars were searched. Nothing interesting was found, though at the time the Sheriff misrepresented things like bike inner tubes as possible slingshot material, or that having paint thinner in the basement, rags in the laundry, and empty bottles in the pantry constituted Molotov cocktail ingredients.

The Evidence

The case has progressed very slowly, but with recent hearings more of the prosecution’s case has been coming out. It’s been over a year and a half and only now are we getting any indication of what the real claims are against the defendants, though the prosecution continues to avoid presenting any real case or plausible complaint.

From the hearings we’re also learning something about the form of the investigation. The FBI was closely involved with the case and recruited the most active informant, and the primary investigator was previously with the Secret Service (which somewhat oddly has a computer-related duties), and at the time there was a great deal of national attention on the convention. So presumably they had the resources to investigate seriously if they wished to do so.

From the perspective of online security the case is very boring. The defendants have been given all the evidence collected during the investigation (including benign or even helpful evidence). It’s a huge amount of evidence, and hard for them to understand or sort through, but some kinds of investigation aren’t there. No email accounts were subpoenaed. Their computers were all confiscated, and will no doubt be kept until after the trial, but there’s nothing high-tech about that. Some of them had whole-disk encryption, and there is no indication it was broken nor were they even asked to provide passwords. There’s also no evidence of sniffing internet connections, tapping phones, breaking into email… nothing fancy was done.

From what we can tell the evidence against them will be primarily from informants’ testimony about open meetings, widely distributed literature, a video posted on YouTube, a password-protected but essentially open wiki (the wiki provider was not subpoenaed, despite things like edit history being potentially interesting).

If they had been any more security-conscious it would have worked against them — it would have been out of line with their ideals and would have made them less effective and transparent in their organizing efforts. The biggest danger now is that they’ll be demonized, that they’ll be judged based on caricatures of their actual beliefs, privacy only makes this worse.

Credit Where Credit Is Due

Perhaps one reason the surveillance was low-tech and subpoenaed evidence is not playing a large part in the case is that it’s just too hard. They used Riseup for many services, which is a set of online services for activists, who take privacy very seriously, log as little as possible, and try to host everything outside of the country so regardless of an activists locality it will be a bureaucratic challenge to get access to the servers.

Outside of the core group most people acted anonymously, so the prosecution would not be able to follow up on most of what they found anyway. Even if they got all the logs and email from everything the Welcoming Committee touched, I’m not sure they could make use of it. If they could somehow relate all that anonymous information, they’d still have to explain those techniques and convince a jury. Data mining and other data-driven techniques could be useful if they were trying to attach people who had done anything wrong. You can use surveillance to find the smoking gun, and once you’ve found it you don’t have to justify the techniques you used in the process. But only if there’s a smoking gun. It’s a peculiar situation where the prosecution doesn’t appear to actually believe they did anything demonstrably wrong; I fear they plan a case where they redefine "wrong".

Privacy

Besides the security issue there’s the privacy issue, and privacy is big on the internet these last few months. One of the oft-claimed benefits of privacy is to allow political dissent. And maybe that makes sense in China, but I don’t know how it relates to the things in the U.S. or Europe.

Political beliefs held in private don’t much matter. Complaining about politics in private situations is fine, because it just doesn’t matter. So sure, you are safe from political persecution if your privacy is maintained… but it’s because you are impotent not because privacy is some part of a political struggle.

This reminds me of a playground sense of privacy. On the playground you might say you like They Might Be Giants and the playground bully says that’s so gay, and you think I shouldn’t have said anything. But it doesn’t really matter how much you reveal in that situation, it doesn’t matter what you say you like — the bully isn’t making a pointed critique on your preferences, they are just trying to hurt you. The only way privacy will help you is if you are so quiet that the bully doesn’t notice you at all and picks on someone else instead. That’s a pathetic stance.

Ramsey County (where the RNC 8 are being charged) is a bully. They decided before the Welcoming Committee even existed that people were going to be arrested, charges were going to be made. The Welcoming Committee stuck their necks out further than anyone else. The problem isn’t that they made themselves vulnerable, the problem is that the Sheriff Fletcher is a bully and County Attorney Gaertner is some kind of automaton who doesn’t give a shit about justice.

And Lastly A Personal Plea

So… while there are general lessons, this case also specifically really sucks for my sister Monica, her significant other Eryn (another member of the Welcoming Committee) and the other six, all of whom I know and are really nice people who don’t deserve any of this shit. They have to spend their evenings reading through evidence or listening to the tapes of their meetings (which were boring enough to listen to the first time around). There’s a certain stigma to having pending felony charges, I know at least my sister has lost a job because of it. And they each have to have their own lawyer, and even though the lawyers aren’t charging them what would be the full rate it’s still a lot of money (like a quarter of a million dollars). Depressingly, in some sense this is all the government has to do; the trial is punishment enough to deter people from being activist organizers.

So I wish a donation was equivalent to Sticking It To The Man, but really it’s just adding some balance because The Man Is Already Sticking It To Them On Your Behalf.

Still, your support would be really helpful.

If it gives you any satisfaction County Attorney Susan Gaertner’s run for the Democratic gubernatorial nomination never went anywhere, I suspect in large part because she wasn’t brave enough to show her face at public events in the Twin Cities because she was consistently protested over this case. I doubt this has influenced the prosecution (at least in any positive way), but it’s satisfying.

The Role Of Protest

It’s challenging to explain and justify protest, at least in this country and at this moment. Probably the biggest blow for protest as a useful form of political expression was the February 15, 2003 protests against the Iraq War. I say this because those were the largest protests the world has ever seen, estimated around 10 million people, and yet they did so little to stop the war.

That war is still with us, and is still the most significant motivation for the RNC protests. The war has gone through many phases since then — purported success, then clear failure by just about anyone’s definition, then ongoing failure labelled as success because of dramatically lowered expectations (the surge). Public opinion has moved several times, but is constrained by what is considered the reasonable options. These "reasonable" options are defined by the Democratic and Republican elite. Balance in news means inviting participation from partisans from those two parties. In this context the Democratic party had a practical landslide in 2006, driven primarily by anti-war sentiments, and then proceeded to do almost nothing to stop the war. If protest has failed, then so has electoral politics.

I don’t have any third path to offer, but I just want to make it clear: none of us know what is best to do, none of us have figured out the way to effect change. People complain protest doesn’t work. Maybe it does, maybe it doesn’t, but frankly most things don’t work. Doing nothing definitely doesn’t work, and frankly that’s what most of us are doing. It’s hard to take criticisms seriously when they are made from a stance of inaction.

What might the RNC protests accomplish?

First, it is an attempt to break out of a politics restricted to two perspectives. I believe, quite firmly, that "radical left" opinions are actually quite mainstream. This was also the goal of the DNC protests. This goal has become quite difficult to achieve. News stations generally ignore protest, and when they do cover protest they seldom talk about the actual issues.

Second, protests can attempt to disrupt normal activity. To be fair, this is probably better termed "civil disobedience", and I’m sure there will be civil disobedience in response to the RNC. One possible goal of civil disobedience is to make news — to be so disruptive that you simply can’t be ignored. And even if the news won’t say why you won’t be ignored, at least one message that can be made clear: everything is not okay. Another goals is simply to disrupt the RNC. This is a bringing together of many of the architects and profiteers of war. This is a convention that includes many people advocating torture.

It’s also a convention of people who buy the lines about the Republican party being "conservative" and supporting "family values" and whatever other bullshit. One argument goes: oh, these poor dullards and simpletons! Do not interrupt their harmless partying! Do not interrupt their absurd views! They deserve their delusions as much as anyone! I say: this stuff is too important to defer to the bullshit of this political grandstanding.

Are We In A Time Of War?

It is all too easy to fall into "protesting for the right to protest". Lest I fall into this, I want to make it clear: protest itself is not the goal. 600,000 Iraqis dead. And to what ends? No ends at all? Unlikely! There is a purpose. It is a purpose architected by people who would throw away hundreds of thousands of lives. People may argue about whether war is valid. I don’t believe it is, nor do Monica or Eryn, but whatever your feelings: this is not an abstract war. This is a specific war. And this specific war is a war made by liars, by people who treat human life lightly, by people whose primary ambition seems focused on power itself.

600,000 dead, and what’s so different in America? Do you feel this war? If you didn’t turn on the TV or listen to the news, what would remind you that we are at war? What would remind you of all that’s happened? We are a nation at war, and yet there is nothing to show us this, it has no presence. Our nation is so large, our institutions so abstracted, our military so partitioned from most of society… we are numb to war. Moving around while numbed is dangerous. You can’t feel what you are doing. A cut doesn’t hurt, a bruise is just a faint sensation. We are a numbed nation and this is dangerous.

If I was to give one reason for civil disobedience, it would be this: to acknowledge this war is real. This isn’t just a difference of opinion, this isn’t just a debate. This is about how we exercise our collective power, the power that is exercised in the form of the state. This is our war, whether we feel it or not.

One of the criticisms of civil disobedience is to say it deprives the Republicans of their free speech. First, this is absurd. No form of civil disobedience deprives them of free speech. No one is taping their mouths shut. No journalists are being detained by activists. No debate is stifled. The RNC’s request: we want to speak our lies without interruption, without distraction. The Republicans have through decades of whining managed to frame the debate, to redefine "common sense" and "conventional thinking", to move the Overton Window far to the right. Free speech does not mean they should not be challenged. Protest challenges the content of their speech, it doesn’t deny them of the ability to speak.

This is an aside, but for all the effort put into limiting the bounds of debate I don’t think the Republicans, or Bush, have really changed the country as much as they are given credit for. I don’t think people are as easily manipulated as that. I think our core values are not so easily affected. If we were not so numb I think it would all come rushing back.

On "Anarchism"

If you read the articles you will see Monica and Eryn called "self-described anarchists". This is true, they are anarchists. I will attempt, briefly and probably inaccurately, to describe what anarchism is.

Anarchism is, at its core, a belief in the individual, and a belief that good flows uniquely from the individual. Conversely, it believes that bad comes from institutions, from the abstractions we build between people. Anarchism is a belief in the power of empathy instead of laws. Instead of leading our lives according to principles that are passed down to us, anarchism says we should live our lives based on our personal reflections and decisions. We should be deliberate, we should not be obedient.

The RNC Welcoming Committee (the name is ironic) is a "anarchist/anti-authoritarian" organization. Ha ha you say, isn’t an anarchist organization an oxymoron? If you meet an anarchist this is the most tedious joke you could possibly make. Anarchism is, of course, a somewhat chaotic philosophy. And any anarchist should be a human first, and an anarchist second — anything else would be contrary to the very principles of anarchism! More practically, they form groups based on shared understandings and motivations, and there is nothing at all inconsistent about individuals working together — indeed it is interpersonal cooperation that is at the heart of anarchist traditions.

Do anarchists want to tear down all institutions? I guess some flavors of anarchist rhetoric make this claim. Looking in from the outside, it feels like some kind of phase adolescent male anarchists go through. There is an underlying lack of respect for institutions and authority, and this is genuine. But though they see nothing wrong with disrupting institutions, violence against people is not considered acceptable. Some would like to categorize property damage as violence, but I find this rather disrespectful of genuine violence. Things don’t feel pain or fear.

Discussions of anarchism tend to degrade very quickly because people are overly obsessed with self-consistency. For instance: how could an entire society run without laws, governments, police, taxes? There are answers and speculations, but we would all do better to make the world we want now and here. This is what actual anarchists do — running whole societies might be fun to theorize about, but building a community is actually attainable, and among progressive groups anarchists are probably the most enthusiastic community builders.

Lastly: why the term "anarchism"? It’s a scary term, though it’s derivation is simply from the term "without rulers". It’s been a term used to scare people for so long that it’s hard to separate the idea from the myth. People at time suggest alternative terms. But anarchism isn’t just a philosophy, it’s a tradition and culture and shared understanding, one that goes back over a hundred years. And anarchists don’t want to disassociate themselves from that tradition. And usually, what does it matter what other people think of the name? It is however awkward when the police are trying to label you as a dangerous extremist.

Violence?

Reports have come out about violent protest. Update: There were reports of "violent protesters". Now police report that "one or two windows were broken" during the entire RNC. In other words, there was almost no violence at all by protesters, and almost no property damage. Frankly I feel stupid for ever believing there were even small groups of "violent protesters". There was simply no violence (under any definition of "violence") of any note by the protesters. (I’m actually surprised there weren’t more windows broken by stray police munitions.) Again police lack basic credibility in their statements. end update

Actual incidents are often exaggerated or fabricated. For instance, in the case of the home raids things like paint, bottles, and rags were labeled as "the ingredients for making Molotov cocktails". I’m sure every reader of this post has sufficient ingredients to make a Molotov cocktail. Also, many people have hatchets, bricks, and other materials. Buckets of urine were particularly attention-grabbing, but the only reason for these was that one of the houses had a broken toilet. The police interpretation of the confiscated material is not credible.

There have also been reports of violence at the protests themselves. First it should be noted that there are no reports of police or bystanders being injured. I personally find it is hard to classify property damage as "violence". If you don’t include property damage then there doesn’t seem to be much evidence of violence.

Protest is confrontational. Some will suggest that protesters should obey police in all situations. They suggest that protesters should obey all laws and only protest where permitted. They suggest protesters should not be disruptive of anyone else. The result would not be protest. In cases like the RNC, where extensive planning was in place to counter protest, non-confrontational protest means protesting according to someone else’s plans, someone who has no desire for the protest to succeed in any way. Once you confront the police, there will be violence — usually by the police. And sure, you can stand with a flower in your hand and get a face full of pepper spray, and of course many people choose that course. It’s a noble choice, but I can’t fault people for making other tactical decisions.

Another protesting tactic is the "black bloq", typically a group of people who try to attract the attention of the police, often through property damage. If the police have nothing better to do, then why not pin down the peaceful protesters and direct them where they can make the least impact? People in the black bloq will try to keep this from happening. It’s unlikely they were at all successful at the RNC as it was so thoroughly militarized. You could debate whether this is a good strategy (and there is lots of debate about this), but probably few people outside activists have any idea that there even is any underlying strategy.

Also, if you wonder why protesters, especially the anarchists, dress the way they do, it is primarily defensive. If you are going to get teargassed and peppersprayed does wearing a handkerchief seem so odd? And if they are tracking people to preemptively arrest, all the more reason to be as anonymous as possible.

Monica and Eryn

I’d like to speak specifically of Monica and Eryn. Talking to Monica about the RNC protests, she was never actually that excited. The RNC isn’t what she wanted to focus on. Why focus on the thing you dislike? Why focus on a political process you don’t believe in? Why focus on the workings of institutions you wish didn’t exist? She would have preferred to work on the scale she felt was valid — to build a community of individuals. But of course events are larger than us, and by whatever coincidence the RNC was coming to the Twin Cities. This is not the sort of thing you can just ignore. And of course it wasn’t up to her whether there would be protests.

Monica and Eryn are competent and diligent, so of course they would become important to the organizing process. It seems that there were infiltrators in many of the organizations, so it’s unsurprising that the police knew who to find when they were getting ready to suppress the protests. The two of them had expected informants from early on. Monica herself worked for a year for the American Friends Service Committee (a Quaker charity and peace advocacy organization) at a time when they were being spied on because of purported fears of violent protest. If you are not aware of Quakerism, it is a quite strictly passivist faith, and the pretense for the spying was exceptionally absurd. So Monica was not particularly shocked that there would be spying in the lead up to the RNC.

The RNC Welcoming Committee is itself a coordinating organization. It was inevitable that many, many groups would want to protest at the RNC. There’s no lack of people who are angry. The Welcoming Committee served as a local resource for all those people — so visitors could find a place to stay in the city, so people could coordinate with each other, so people could perform their chosen form of protest in as well-informed a manner as possible. That it is being painted as an organization with criminal intent is a complete misrepresentation; the Welcoming Committee specifically has no intention of direct action.

The preemptive arrest was surprising to everyone. It is normal in the course of civil disobedience that some people expect to be arrested. Civil disobedience is confrontational. You have to go into it knowing that there will be certain consequences. Those are the consequences of the confrontation. They are not the consequences of the possibility of future confrontation. As organizers I know Monica and Eryn weren’t planning on being arrested.

But I haven’t written this essay in anger over their arrest. Protest is conflict. The lines of conflict move, and I find this move to preemptive arrest quite troubling, but I’m also optimistic that they won’t ultimately be charged with anything. I also don’t want to slip into the protest-to-protest mode, more obsessed with the form of protest than the function of this protest. This is a frustrating turn of events, and I’m sure no one is more frustrated than the two of them — one sequestered in a jail, the other in legal limbo, at the culmination of all their work over the last year. But I didn’t write this essay out of anger but because I wanted to recognize what they’ve been doing and do my best to explain it to other people, because I’m proud of them. They are exactly the model of an engaged, ethically driven citizenry.

I see lots of comments like "this country is a fascist state!" and "this is just like Nazi Germany!" But of course this country is not those things. That’s what happens when the citizenry of a country stands down, when they look away from what’s happening right in front of them, when they ignore justice and discard empathy. This country is not those things because of Monica and Eryn and the thousands of people who will be present and paying attention when the RNC lands from on high.

To support Monica, Eryn, and the other charged members of the RNC Welcoming Committee, and also to get updates on the case and news coverage of the case, please visit rnc8.org